Maclaine Sparks A New Age Phenomenon

February 22, 1987|By MARGO HARAKAS, Staff Writer

Weeks after actress Shirley MacLaine captured 17.6 million viewers with the TV version of her real-life quest for spiritual meaning, local bookstores, psychic centers and spiritualists are being swamped by New Age truth-seekers.

``Our entire occult section has been wiped out,`` says Mart Sadler, manager of WaldenBooks in Plantation`s Broward Mall. ``People have been coming in and buying arm loads of books, anything they could get.``

``My phone hasn`t stopped ringing,`` says Fort Lauderdale`s Seraine ``Deene`` Newman who, like one of the characters in MacLaine`s story, calls herself a psychic channeler, a person who is a conduit for communication from the spirit world.

What MacLaine`s memoir-turned-miniseries, Out on a Limb, has done, apparently, is free from the closet a whole new batch of people who have experienced the inexplicable, but remained silent. Now these adherents of the New Age -- the term refers to an amalgam of Eastern philosophy and psychic theories -- are queuing up for some heady inner (or out-of-body) exploration.

``It`s been a phenomenon,`` says Lilia Logette, director of the Society for Psychical Research Inc., in Hollywood, who says phone calls have increased by at least 25 percent.

``Shirley MacLaine touched a chord in many people,`` Logette says. ``Many others are now giving themselves permission to be interested.``

Indeed, on a recent evening at the society`s center, Ruth Berger, a medium from Chicago, drew a packed house of believers -- about 60 or 70 people -- who paid $6 each for a peek into the future.

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

Two well-dressed women wanted to know what career advancements to expect over the next couple of years. A widow inquired if she would remarry. The wife of a physician asked why her husband had encountered so many setbacks in recent months. A woman whose daughter committed suicide last year wanted to know if the daughter could be reincarnated through a new pregnancy. (The answer was no.)

At the Aquarian Research Center in West Palm Beach, novitiates are signing up for classes in healing and extrasensory perception. At the Shamballa bookstore, also in West Palm Beach, they are paying $15 an hour to recline in a wooden pyramid furnished with, among other things, hundreds of pounds of crystals. And in Fort Lauderdale at New Age Books & Things Inc., they`re paying $5 each for computerized astrological charts.

These people are not wild-eyed weirdos. They are teachers and nurses, actresses and account executives, engineers, psychologists, lawyers and the like.

And they`re talking earnestly, though not always for attribution, about being able to put their hands through walls, communicate with spirits and peek into the future.

A 28-year-old Fort Lauderdale woman, who asked not to be identified, became interested in the paranormal about a year and a half ago after making contact, she says, with ``Christopher and Charles,`` entities from beyond. They made themselves known, she explains, through automatic writing, in which a ``spirit`` uses her hand to write messages from a spirit world.

``I was scared to death, the first time it happened. I was shaking all over,`` she says. ``It was like someone gripping my hand.``

Tori Baker, a 28-year-old mother from North Palm Beach, has turned to tarot cards and a Japanese form of healing called reiki. ``Reiki gives you a way of tapping into the universal energy,`` she says.

For Kim Strazza, 17, a tourist from Connecticut, conversion came after a woman read some tea leaves and told Strazza of her future and her past. ``It was really weird. She told me my parents had just bought some property, which she couldn`t have known. And she told me all sorts of things about my friends.``

MILLIONS OF EXPERIENCES

That there is a psychic rush taking place, people scrambling for otherworld connections to guide them through the labyrinth of the here and now, is borne out by a new survey conducted by author-priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley.

Greeley and his colleagues at the National Opinion Research Council at the University of Chicago report that 67 percent of the adult American population has experienced ESP and deja vu. About 42 percent say that they have been in touch with a spirit world.

Reporting on his findings in the January/February issue of American Health magazine, Greeley writes that, while it would be easier to deny such experiences, ``millions of Americans`` have them.

South Florida`s New Agers seem to agree that MacLaine`s high profile evangelism has, as Jackie Millspaugh, owner of Shamballa bookstore, puts it, ``made it more socially acceptable to believe in these things. She helped to explain things that seem outrageous and showed they really do happen. It`s a truth. It`s not a fantasy.``